A fly-by-Night Trap

As a freelancer (in many fields), it's easy for me to fall into the trap of working on weekends, as I can always take a day off during the week. However, as I tend to work 10-20 hour days most weeks (because I love my work), I have recently started to dedicate the weekends to goofing around. However, my goofing around is often just as much work as it is play, frequently because I'm usually trying to do something silly...Like setup a media server on my TV or program a universal remote to execute applescripts on a Mac. What can I say? I'm a nerd.

Dana Plato wonders why you don't come on in for some hot Vamp-on-Co-Ed Action?

Most recently I've been tweaking that little media server to see if I can't get it to play old video games and integrate them into the browser I use to scroll through my other media. You know, to make it so I never have to get up off the couch again. Maybe I won't be satisfied until I've created a molecular bond with the thing, the two of us becoming one being of leathery comfort and perfection....

Where was I? Ah yes, setting up the machine to play Sega CD games.

After getting the damn thing working (which was no small feat, mind), I trolled around the interwebs for copies of classic games that I could use in my little arcade. It was then that I stumbled across this little forgotten "gem".

Supposedly setup to remind you of a B-grade slumber party horror movie, Night Trap wants you to think it's all about scantily clad nymphets getting themselves ganked by unknown perpetrators in an "interactive movie experience". What it really is, however, is a convoluted jumble that mixes in "Augers" (vampire-like beings dressed as Ninjas), a Spec-Ops team, vampires, and the troubled Dana Plato (Any child of the eighties will remember her from Diff'rent Strokes). Oh, and a Nightgown scene in a bathroom that got congress all up in arms.

Like many Full Motion Video (FMV) games, you spend most of your time watching pixelated cinematic sequences before entering in pre-determined key sequences to move onto the next cinematic. However, as this was was among the first of its kind in 1992, it was kinda shiny and new. Looking back at it, the fact that it had 6 different endings and over an hour of footage make it fairly impressive from a technological standpoint. Not to say the game was any fun, mind you, but still technologically impressive for its time.